Not sure if you were maybe joking, but Seeing like a Bank is itself a pun on the famous book "Seeing like a state"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

So you've come almost full circle!

It is the full circle! patio11 refers to that explicitly in the blog. But most people here probably saw and remember Pat's blog more than the book.

The book is very famous! I would guess more people have heard of it than read that specific BAM post.

You're almost certainly right. But I bet the tables tip distinctly the other way if you're talking about HN readers instead of everybody. So I'd guess you're both right.

These companies are spending billions on custom datasets for a gazillion of valuable tasks and are clamping down on exfil for distillation. It's not guaranteed open source models will continue to keep pace.

China might purchase the data and train their models just to make the AI bubble pop. A few billions to throw a wrench in your competing superpower economy might be totally worth it

If they did that it would be pursuing a commodify-the-complement strategy of some kind, not just "popping" a bubble. Same as nVidia publishing their own open models. If anything the value of everything AI would rise even further due to Jevons' Paradox.

And yet open models have been tailing closer lately?

Claude Code in dwarf fortress would be wild

Given dwarf fortress has an ASCII interface it may actually be a lot easier to set up claude to work with it. Also, a lot of the challenges of dwarf fortress is just knowing all the different mechanics and how they work which is something claude should be good at.

And it’s (Claude) almost certainly accumulated a fair amount of knowledge about the game itself, given the number of tutorials, guides, and other resources that have been written about DF over the last two decades.

Unfortunately it's rendering ASCII characters as sprites using SDL, so it's not really a text interface.

Wouldn't that most likely lead to less rather than more construction of single family homes?

Holy shit I just learned about using space to navigate between characters. That's amazing, thanks.

If you tap and hold a second thumb after you’ve tapped and held to bring up the moveable cursor, it switches to a selection range.

Well.....I'll be damned.

I need this desperately when the Claude app gets in a psuedo error state.

My life just changed forever too...

Pasting a comment here I made on the previous article:

To me the most important fact to keep in mind about geothermal is that the energy flow across the crust is ~0.1W/m^2. Compare that to the sun which has >100W/m^2 even at high latitudes. Of course this does not mean geothermal is useless (in particular heat pumps, if you count those, are great), but it goes a long way to explaining why geothermal isn't seeing the same explosion as solar.

> the energy flow across the crust is ~0.1W/m^2

It's a misleading comparison. This is only the average amount of heat that diffuses through an ordinary patch of surface, and has more or less nothing to do with how a geothermal plant works, since they don't harvest heat by covering a large area of surface with conducting material.

The surface heat flow is low because rock acts as an insulator. If you drill down to where it's hot and draw the heat up you obviously get orders of magnitude larger flows of energy to the surface.

Are you suggesting to basically harvest the thermal energy in the rock in a non-renewable fashion? I don't think that is very promising, the heat capacity of rock is not that huge.

Back of the envelope calculation is drawing 1 GW from a cubic Kilometer of rock would lower the temperature by 1 degree C every 25 days. So I think you'd deplete a typical borehole quite quickly?

> Are you suggesting to basically harvest the thermal energy in the rock in a non-renewable fashion?

As I understand it, that's how many geothermal plants work, effectively mining the heat underneath them, but at a rate of extraction that means they would become uneconomical over a span of decades rather than months.

Doesn't that deep down rock reach equilibrium with the system and is then limited by the flow rate?

Exactly. The only exception to this are very rare sites like the one in Iceland where you can get close to a magma cell which has a much higher thermal gradient and possibly magma convection replenishing it.

> Compare that to the sun which has >100W/m^2 even at high latitudes.

Some places are covered with snow and get under 8 hours of sun a day, but your point still stands.

You know it's pretty compelling when there are several concurrent multi-billion dollar projects to transmit solar power from Africa, by undersea cable, to mainland Europe.

Should the technologies mentioned in the article can be perfected for large scale use, we would see a boom in geothermal, even larger than that of solar, as intermittency is automatically resolved.

Iceland and Australia would become new powers imho.

Can someone inside comment if this is this a cider fork or a new branch off vscode?

To me the most important fact to keep in mind about geothermal is that the energy flow across the crust is ~0.1W/m^2. Compare that to the sun which has >100W/m^2 even at high latitudes. Of course this does not mean geothermal is useless (in particular heat pumps, if you count those, are great), but it goes a long way to explaining why geothermal isn't seeing the same explosion as solar.

I think perhaps what is going on here is that the most commonly exported variety of cheese exported from Switzerland is Emmentaler, which matches the US taste profile (and has holes), but in Switzerland is considered a rather bland variety compared to e.g. Gruyere or Appenzeller. Maybe that got a bit exaggerated and it was labeled as "junk" cheese somewhere along the chain of communication.